


Returning the Favour

by bazoolium



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Post-Promised Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bazoolium/pseuds/bazoolium
Summary: After Ed and Al return to Resembool, Winry bakes an apple pie. Ed finally remembers to fulfil his own promise.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell
Comments: 3
Kudos: 82





	Returning the Favour

“Honestly, Ed, if you’d at least called ahead, I would have been able to have the pie on the table hours ago,” Winry says, rolling her eyes as she opens the oven door. Her movements are careful, practiced, as she picks up the tin with oven-gloved hands, and places it on a mat. The smell of cooked apples fills the air, and Ed swears he can even smell the cinnamon and cloves that Winry had added. “Still, I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything else from you.” 

Even if Ed didn’t know Winry at all, he would have noticed by the way that the smile hasn’t left her face all afternoon that her harsh words didn’t mirror her true feelings. “Can’t you just be grateful to see us?” 

A shadow briefly crosses her sunny countenance, before she quickly turns to face him and says, “Grateful to see Al, maybe. I’m not so sure about you - especially after whatever you did to your arm! Don’t either of you understand the slightest thing about ports?” 

“Ha! I bet you’re just upset because you’ve lost another job, automail freak,” he retorts, folding his arms and leaning back against the counter, watching her peel off the gloves and place them neatly on top of each other.

It’s now her turn to fold her arms. “Don’t forget that you’re still dependent on me for that leg!”

“Maybe I’ll just find another engineer, that would serve you right,” he says, jamming his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. When he feels cold metal brush against his left fingers, he withdraws it instinctively.

“What is it, Ed?” She asks, peering at him curiously. 

“I’m not sure – no, wait, I think it’s…” he starts, placing his hand back in his pocket to fish out the offending object. With it retrieved, he opens his fist to reveal three pairs of silver earrings. “I’d almost forgotten I’d put them in here,” he says, softly. 

Her mouth forms an ‘o’ as she gazes at Ed’s hand, as if she’d just seen a magic trick. It’s been a long time since she’d last seen them, yet here they are, undamaged and unmistakably hers. 

Ed realises that she’s looking upon them with awe, and so he immediately holds out his hand towards her, brandishing them. “Here,” he says, stiffly. “Take them.”

The spell still unbroken, she reaches her hand out towards his, and scoops them up. She rolls the earrings around in her palms a couple of times. Then, with renewed energy, she takes the backs off the earrings, one by one, and asks him, “Can you give me a hand?” 

“Winry, I don’t know the first thing about earrings,” he says, watching her apprehensively.

She laughs. “Can you hold back my hair, so I can put them in?”

“Oh. Sure.” It seems like a simple enough task.

She sweeps back her long blonde hair behind one of her ears, and then beckons him closer. He approaches, with only the slightest hesitation in his step, and dutifully holds her hair back. It’s silky and slippery in his hands, but he tries to hold it gently, so as not to hurt her. Placing the others onto the counter, she puts one earring back in at a time, starting with the studs. 

When she’s finished with the first ear, she raises an eyebrow at Ed, who drops the hair he’d been holding and takes the other side, which she passes to him. Just as carefully, she puts her last two earrings back in. Then, smiling triumphantly, she turns around to face him. 

“Ed, I –” she starts, but stops just as abruptly. She looks away from him, trying to find something to focus on, and seems to settle for the pie. “Thank you.”

“What for?” 

She then looks up at him, with the familiar warmth in her eyes. “For returning my earrings.” _For coming home safe._

“Oh…I…er. Don’t mention it.” He says, rather bashfully, and hastily draws his gaze away from her eyes and towards the floor. 

But, despite his discomfort, he can hear the smile in her voice as she continues, “I can’t believe you hung on to them all this time. It feels like so long ago that I gave them to you – back in Baschool, do you remember?”

He meets her eyes again and matches her smile, gently. “Yeah. Just before you went and did something really reckless.”

She splutters slightly, before saying, “You’re one to talk!”

He chuckles at that, before he’s seized with something else – a more serious mood perhaps – and doesn’t catch himself before the words slip out. “They meant a lot to me.” 

“Yeah?” She says, bravely stepping forwards, even closer to him. 

“Yeah,” he replies, the word catching in his throat as he says it. Of course he was completely serious about it. They’d been a physical reminder of their promises, but they’d been more than that to him. Through the six months that they’d been separated, they were all that he had of her – all that he had to remind him of Resembool and what awaited him there. 

“Um…the pie’s getting cold,” she murmurs. But she doesn’t move away, standing completely still. Her face is only a few inches away from his face, so close that he can see a tiny patch of grease that she’s missed, by her nose. He can see that her eyes are still slightly red from all those tears – tears of joy – that she had cried only a few hours ago. He can see the freckles on her cheeks, the same ones she gets every summer, the ones that the girls in her class had relentlessly teased her about until Winry had pushed their leader, screaming, into the pond by the school. Her face is so well-known to him, and yet somehow this close up, she looks completely different, as if he were looking at a painting. It’s unmistakably Winry, but there’s a new angle that he hadn’t quite considered before. 

“Oh, right.” He says, at last, looking away from Winry and taking a step back. He can feel his face heating up, so he instinctively turns away from her. “I better go and get Al before that happens,” he says, walking towards the stairs. 

“Wait, Ed,” he hears her say, and then he feels her hand grab his right one. It’s still a new sensation to him – warmth and pressure, and the feeling of her skin (so much rougher than he expected) against his. He stops and slowly turns around to meet her blue eyes, staring at him intently. 

“What is it, Winry?”

She leans in and carefully touches her lips to his cheek. “Thank you,” she says again and drops his hand, before turning back to the counter. She stares intently at the knife block, as if she’s sizing them up for a fight, before selecting one and pulling it out. Taking the pie, she begins to slice it, as she says, “Can you go and get Al, then?”

Ed is certain that if he wasn’t bright red before, he is now. The place where her lips had been is burning and he almost reaches one hand up to touch it, but has just enough control to restrain himself from doing so. He feels fixated to the spot, unwilling to move from the site even to get his brother. Nevertheless, he nods slowly and drags his feet away. “I’m sure he’s looking forwards to it,” he says, half to her and half to himself.

**Author's Note:**

> everyone's got to write an earrings-returning fic, right?


End file.
